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Saturday, July 1, 2017

Who Is Getting Rich Off the Secret Health-Care Overhaul?

https://www.thenation.com/article/who-is-getting-rich-off-the-secret-health-care-overhaul/
"Political-intelligence firms are a fast-growing sector in Washington: They spread out across the capital and gather information from various regulatory bodies, Pentagon offices, and congressional committees. They then sell this information to clients, who are often Wall Street banks and individual investors who use it to get ahead of markets. If this sounds like insider trading, that’s because it basically is—though the legal lines around what constitutes a quid-pro-quo benefit are vague and sometimes difficult to enforce. There are many instances where a political-intelligence firm is clearly just providing basic, legal research for investors, but at times employees have been charged with insider trading. Earlier this year, the Justice Department indicted a political-intelligence professional for passing advance knowledge about Medicare-reimbursement rates, which he learned from an official at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, to two hedge-fund managers. The hedge-fund managers shorted the stocks of health-care companies that would be adversely affected by the rate change. They were also indicted, as was the CMS official. But it’s generally hard to tell when a legal line is crossed, in part because there is no transparency around political intelligence firms. Provisions that would force these companies to disclose their clients were originally included in a 2012 government reform bill, but then–House majority leader Eric Cantor had it stripped."